Life Lessons – You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know

He just wasn’t showing up and I couldn’t understand why. Failing all of his stuff and not even coming to exam prep/review. I mean, if there was any class that I would be coming to – it’d be that one. Unless I had to go to court. To find out if me and my wife could keep the house that my Great-Grandmother gave me because, in this economy, I was crashing and burning when it came to the mortgage payment. Then I might not be able to come to class.

And she was always late. Always some new ache or pain; she a pain in my butt as a patient – until her latest visit. Told me all these symptoms and said, “It’s all energetically related, what do you think it is?” …without letting me answer and firing off into soliloquies about her numerous little health problems. Finally letting me speak I replied, “I think you’re wound up like a top. Your mind is going so fast.” “Maybe I should go see a doctor, they might order an MRI.” “Um, no…they’ll most likely put you on anti-anxiety medication I think…” And then she broke down and started crying. Cried as I held her hand and gave her a tissue, “I’m under so much stress.” “I have so much pressure to hold everything together,” she wept.

And there they were. Two different people that gave me such a hard time in life reminding me that key lesson that my ego somehow forgot:

It’s not about me. It’s about them and their stuff – that’s why they’re acting the way they do.

It’s possible for someone to leave their tribe and join an immediately adjacent tribe, but for someone in tribe 1 to join tribe 5 they first need to join tribe 2, then tribe 3, then tribe 4 and finally tribe 5.

Trying to get someone to go from “Life Sucks” to “Life’s Great” without having them progress through the other tribes is like trying to make a fish become a bird without going through the process of evolution.

Look. Listen. Question. Feel. Knowing what tribe someone is in can point the way towards the next evolutionary step to take.

They say that before judging someone, we should walk a mile in their shoes. This is true for the tribe as well: before we judge, we should know what it’s like to perceive and respond from a particular angle.

What they neglect to say is that we all walk barefoot through this world.

Beyond the shoes, beyond the tribe and beyond all acquired conditioning exists the common ground of nature. The common ground on which, in which and with which evolution occurs.

Help people fight their battles, one tribe at a time, with the innate tools of nature… That way they stand a chance of winning their war.